


Phoenix

by musamihi



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-27
Updated: 2011-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-28 06:34:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/304795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the fall, Holmes has to have hope enough for both of them.  Written for a song prompt: <i>Fall on Me</i>, R.E.M.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Phoenix

_there's a problem, feathers iron  
bargain buildings, weights and pulleys  
feathers hit the ground before the weight can leave the air_

The nights are still crushingly cold here. The natives - the innkeeper and his charming family - insist that the breeze is warmer now, and there's a hint of green in everything, as though the tarnish of winter were being gradually polished away. But there's a cold he can't leave behind, a bone-deep damp that has less to do with the weather and more with the great ghosts of mist rising out of the rent in the earth that swallows up the falls of the Reichenbach. He stands now at the head of the path into the hills - as far as he'll let himself walk in the dark, with nothing but a lantern and a stick to keep him from losing himself forever - and imagines he can still hear it. He _can_ still feel it. He doubts he'll ever break free of that fog. The sky seems small and black, bearing down on him like the lid of a jar.

The innkeeper looked at him like he was a damned fool when he said he was going out again. He has no idea how right he was. He's the biggest damned fool who's ever lived.

 _there's the progress we have found  
a way to talk around the problem  
building towered foresight isn't anything at all_

His watch is a dead, shattered weight in his pocket, but it's between one and one-thirty in the morning - Perseus is looming at an unmistakable angle on the horizon, fading in and out of view as his breath rises up in rhythmic clouds. Stiff with cold and twisted limbs, he stops to rest a moment in the safe shadow of a jagged rock - and then, perhaps a little reckless after his day of crashing through the Alpine foothills, clambers up to the peak of it and into the moonlight. It's an excusable risk. He's reached the sheer, stony side of the mountain that leads into the next valley, and he'll need to scout the best way down.

His first glance is to the north and west, however. Everything is dark. It's no surprise that there should be no visible lights to mark Meiringen, given the distance and the profusion of evergreens, but of course he knows that just because he can't see something doesn't mean it isn't there. The other end of Hydra, for instance, isn't lost forever to the ragged, black line of trees that seems to swallow it up, but slithers on past the equator through the free and endless darkness to bask in a gentler climate, where Phoenix circles its distant pole.


End file.
